A town eaten alive by the earth

Are miracles still possible? Colonel Jean-Jacques Mornat mused the question as he waited for a helicopter out of Balakot on the floor of a Kashmiri valley. Hours earlier the French officer had led a rescue team that plucked five children from the concertina-like ruins of a collapsed school. Impressively, they survived 72 hours after Saturday's awesome quake.

But they were probably the last lucky ones left in town, he said. The French team had packed its bags and was leaving. "Of course I believe in miracles," declared Col Mornat. "But there are none left here."

Balakot looks like a town that has been eaten alive. The convulsion buckled the earth, chewed up buses and levelled practically every building in sight. Nobody can provide the death toll because there is nobody to ask. The mayor, the police chief, the magistrate - all swallowed up by the earth.

Yet four days later, promised relief has not arrived. There are no food queues, no water tankers, no tents, just thousands of hungry, cold and increasingly angry residents.

So yesterday a volunteer army of Pakistani men took matters into their own hands. From morning the twisting mountain road leading to Balakot was clogged with cars, trucks and perilously overcrowded buses. The volunteer army came from as near as the next village and as far as Karachi, hundreds of miles south. They came from all walks of life - labourers, office clerks and university lecturers - bringing modest supplies of medicine, food but an abundant promise of help.

"They appealed for volunteers at my local mosque last night," said Muhammad Yunis, a 40-year-old farmer carrying a farmyard hoe in his hand. "I felt it was my duty to come."

If they came to save the living, many ended up searching for the dead. With thousands of decaying corpses still trapped in the rubble (a sickly whiff pervades the town) Balakot's most pressing worry is to dispose of them.

Some volunteers were clearly overwhelmed. "It looks like God has cursed this place," said Javed Anwar from nearby Abbottabad.

Hidayat Rehman, an agriculture lecturer from Peshawar, had cancelled class and brought 50 students to help. But they had no tools to cut through the wreckage. "We don't even know how to start," Dr Rehman said, standing helplessly before a crushed school. "This is so heartbreaking."

Throughout the morning soldiers, survivors and volunteers swarmed over the debris. Schoolbags were piled on the roof of a girls' school that had been crumpled down to waist height.

Silver-helmeted rescuers from the United Arab Emirates sifted through the wreckage using sniffer dogs and sonar probes. "Hello? Hello?" shouted one, banging on a wooden door under a collapsed roof. There was no answer.

Fear of a second quake hung in the air like an unspoken curse. Now and again the ground vibrated alarmingly for a few seconds, then stopped.

It was so much easier to work after the tsunami, said Saif Abdul, a 32-year-old police officer from Dubai. "There you didn't have to search for the dead, there were thousands of bodies on the road," he said.

In the town market, a sprawling jumble of flattened shops, rotting vegetables and scattered tins, Inamul Haq drove a sledgehammer into the roof of a grocer's shop.

The 32-year-old engineer was helping a friend, Raja Hanif, search for his dead brother. They believed he was buried under the roof at their feet. He was scathing about the government's efforts to help. "The army has come here pretending to help but they are doing nothing," he spat. "The officers drive up, look at us, and drive away. It's all a sham." Moments later the missing corpse poked through the debris. Mr Haq threw his arms around Mr Hanif, who burst into choking sobs. Then his own eyes welled with tears.

The army had run up to 100 emergency helicopter flights into the valley yesterday, evacuating the wounded and bringing some limited food supplies, said Major General Shakeel Hussain. "I appreciate people's impatience. But there is a limit to what we can do," he pleaded.

Rescue efforts stalled at lunchtime, when the battleship grey sky split open, spilling a torrent of rain over town. But the work of burying the dead continued.

Mourners took the corpses on wicker beds to a hillside where they were hastily buried. One mass grave had already been filled beside a basketball court. As the rain pelted down, a team of boy scouts helped fill a second one.

The emotional toll weighed heavily on survivors. Mohsin Khan, 21, returned home from university on Monday to find his mother, brother, sister and grandmother had been killed. He cried in the car on the way home, he said, but had not allowed a single tear since. "I am young, I am energetic, and there is too much to do," he said. "After all this is my town." He paused to correct himself. "This was my town."

But after the rain, Chinese rescuers brought unexpected good news: a five-year-old boy had been pulled alive from the rubble in a village three miles away. Maybe, just maybe, miracles are still possible in Pakistan today.